Language

Describing wine

Don't let's whine

WHEN it comes to describing wine, few people take issue with "fruity", "acidic" or "ruby". Most can handle "blackcurrant", "chocolate", "tobacco", "truffle" or even "toast" (this Johnson swears to having caught a whiff of all five). But then self-styled connoisseurs begin spouting attributes like "graphite" (which does not smell or—if nibbling pencil ends is any guide—taste of anything), "zesty mineral" (how it differs from plain mineral is anyone's guess), "angular" (huh?), or "dumb" (indeed). Little wonder oenological jargon gets a bad rap. And oenophiles (your correspondent among them) stand accused of bamboozling the uninitiated, probably out of some underhanded motive.

In an essay published a few years ago in Journal of Wine Economics under the title "On Wine Bullshit", Richard Quandt, an economist at Princeton University, puts it thus:

In some instances, there is an unhappy marriage between a subject that especially lends itself to bullshit and bullshit artists who are impelled to comment on it. I fear that wine is one of those instances where this unholy union is in effect.

Indeed. But does vinous verbiage serve any purpose other than to bemuse run-of-the-mill wine drinkers? In a recent article in Slate, Coco Krumme, a wine economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggests—tongue in cheek—that the answer may be "yes":

Since it sometimes seems as though wine tasting is a fixed game of bluffs (let my gravel pass, and I won't challenge your carob), I began to wonder if wine descriptors might not be correlated with something other than flavour: price.

To test the hypothesis, she looked at online reviews of over 3,000 bottles priced $5-200 and found that a wine's price can be predicted on the basis of what terms, and combinations of terms, feature in the description (she used a method called a Bayesian classifier, employed in many spam filters to assign a legitimacy rating to messages depending on the words that make it up).

The analysis revealed, first off, that "cheap" and "expensive" words are used differently. Cheap words are more likely to be recycled, while words correlated with expensive wines tend to be in the tail of the distribution. That is, reviewers are more likely to create new vocabulary for top-end wines [...] Of course that doesn't explain why boysenberry, for instance, sounds expensive to wine critics, while refreshing sounds cheap. My guess is that, when it comes to invoking elegance, foreign and complex words have a natural advantage. Cigars and truffle conjure up prestige and luxury. Meanwhile, a little-known berry or spice conveys the worldly sophistication of the critic, which the drinker can share. For a price.

In an earnest effort to nix subjectivity from reviews, critics have gone too far, leaving us with a bag of adjectives that say a lot about price, and almost nothing about flavour.

This does not, of course, mean that the entire repertory of wine terms deserves to be consigned to the spittoon. As Ms Krumme admits, however hesitantly, expensive wines may actually carry some olfactory notes cheaper plonk lacks (hence the "almost" in the final sentence above). More importantly, though, consuming wine is often about more than just physical pleasure. It is also a game. There is no denying the intense satisfaction derived from a sense that one has put a finger on what it is that makes a bottle taste great. Like many intellectual pastimes, this one, too, relies on playing with words. Just stay off the silly tropes.

Readers' comments

Playing with words indeed, and a good-natured game of one snob openly trying to out-snob another. I was in a local restaurant billing itself as "authentic German". When the dish came, my companion ordered appropriately a beer. Not at all a beer drinker and knowing zero about it, I tasted the beer. With a big frown and a straight face, I demanded something more Wagnerian as the one offered was too Straussian. To which the beer pourer responded, "Wotan or Siegfried?". True, the beer tasted better after that.

And of course Brian Wansink and others have found the same wine served in two different rooms with two different labels are rated very differently with the cheaper label and cheaper room "creating" worse wine or, perhaps more interestingly, a nice label and nice room "creating" a better wine.

The contextuality of taste is a big topic but to keep this to language: if you can find words yourself or associate your experience with the words of others, then your enjoyment increases because you now have a context in which the experience is better.

Of course most people expect snobbery and fanciful adjectives to be associated with wine. Fritz Maytag, a pioneer in the craft brewing world, said, "It's very hard to get pretentious about beer. You can become knowledgeable and start to talk with a highfalutin' vocabulary. But you can only go so far with beer, and I've always liked that."

But Mr Maytag was much ahead of his time and so couldn't imagine that the beer world today very much mirrors Ms. Krumme's wine world. Spend an evening with beer lovers and you'll hear "leather", "horse blanket", or even "barnyard" being used to describe the beer.

So if the beer world today is copying the wordplay of wine tasting, is this a sign that beer is recognized now as offering an equally complex and nuanced beverage as wine, or that beer lovers are as snobbish as oenophiles?

We've tried hard. on the Sediment blog, to widen the scope of wine descriptions. A recent favourite: "The first gusts from the neck of the bottle practically blinded me, and if you don't give it time to shake off the cellulose and vinegar fumes while it's sitting in the glass, you will find your mouth puckering like a drawstring pouch. Sip it respectfully, and it turns into a blackcurranty kind of sluicing narrowly covering the roof of the mouth, followed by a hot gas blast in the back of the throat, a lingering impression of plastic adhesive, ending with a peppery flourish of underarm deodorant spreading down towards the lungs. Not great, but not something you could feel indifferent towards, either." That should open things up a little...

I drink red wine almost every day, which qualifies me as experienced in wine, if not talented in oenophilia.

I have found that a really cheap wine, perhaps costing €2 in France or £4 in the UK, does not taste as good as a better wine, perhaps costing £6 in the UK. However, the law of diminishing returns seems to kick in very rapidly after this price point.

Denmark has seen quite a revolution in the beer industry after many micro-breweries made a market increasingly flooded with standard, average-tasting pilsener satisfyingly diverse. With it came a new and annoying terminology to describe its taste - and high prices.